30. Focusing on Fascia with Jill Miller

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00:00:00 

Jennifer Milner 

Hello, and welcome to bendy bodies with the hypermobility MD, where we explore the intersection of health  and hypermobility for dancers and other artistic athletes. I'm Jennifer Milner here with co-host Dr. Linda.  

00:00:13 

Linda Bluestein 

Before we introduce today's guests with the first slide to remind you about how you can help us help you first  subscribe to the bendy bodies podcast and leave us a review. This is helpful for raising awareness about  hypermobility and associated disorders. Second, share the bendy bodies podcast with your friends, family, and  providers. We really appreciate you helping us grow our audience in order to make a meaningful difference.  This podcast is for you.  

00:00:38 

Jennifer Milner

Our guest today is Jill Miller co-founder of tuneup fitness, worldwide, and creator of the self care fitness  formats, yoga tuneup, and a role model method. She has studied extensively. The links between fitness, yoga,  massage, athletics, and pain management. Her unique self-care fitness programming has been adopted by global  gym chains, Equinox 24 hour fitness yoga works and integrated into clinical practice and athletic facilities across the globe. Jill is the former anatomy columnist for yoga journal magazine and featured in multiple  publications, including the New York times wall street journal O shape women's health and featured on the  today show and Oprah Winfrey network. Hi, Jill, and welcome to bendy bodies. We are so glad you came on to  share your wisdom with us. Now you have very generously shared a lot about your own struggles in health, on  social media, for those listeners who are just discovering you, can you give them a little background? 

00:02:01 

Jill Miller 

I just want to do it first of all, a reverse like mega thank you for welcoming me here. Have been consuming your  media for quite some time and become extremely educated and identified, a number of times by listening to  your podcast. So, just thank you for being here, but, yes, I have had a number of health struggles that all seemed  to be completely unrelated to one another until I started going down the rabbit hole of the researchers that were  really identifying these connective tissue out their origin traits that seem to be blooming a number of different  buds. I got lots of buds in my body that fit into this tree. The most recent really is that I had a early hip  replacement, had a total hip replacement at age 46. Oh boy. Oh, now I can't remember 45 or 46. I think it was  45.  

00:03:07 

Jill Miller 

Yeah. Early hip replacement, age 45. And, and I had been a local professional for decades prior to that. And my  journey with the hip replacement. It really puzzled. It just absolutely confounded me when I got the images,  because I wasn't really living in crippling pain, I was able to move relatively well. I had the red herring was my  tensor fascia Lata, would have a recurrent spasm about once every seven weeks, but I could usually, train myself  out of that pain, but because of the frequency and the repetition of this pain, I thought, well, maybe I've got a  labral tear. I, I finally got imaging once I had my second son and was about a year and a half into, nursing him. I  just didn't want, I didn't want any imaging until I knew that I had given my son as much life as I possibly could.  

00:04:09 

Jill Miller 

When I had the imaging, they were like, well, what labor them? because I was bone on bone, osteophytes  everywhere. I'm looking at my bone right here, actually, cause it lives on my desk. That I'm that person who  kept her bone. Can you show it to us? It's in its little corral. It's in the little, my gosh. We love. Wow. That's  awesome. Well thank you for appreciating. I mean, it's not awesome, but what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty  crazy to think there's a piece of me sitting over there. I have, a really cool, prosthesis that gives me a terrific  range of motion and with, no, really no risk of having to do a repair at any point in my life. I was really shocked  that I had end stage osteoarthritis and that nothing could be done. And, when I went in to my orthopedist and I  got an appointment with a great orthopedist in Los Angeles who has a very novel approach called the direct  superior approach.  

00:05:15 

Jill Miller 

And, he came into the room, I laid down on the table for the exam after he said, hello. He said, when do you  want to schedule, like before he even did his assessment, just based on my images, his next words to me were  when do you want a schedule? When he did the assessment and he circumducting my hip, he just set up, there's  your pre-existing condition right there. And, I still get really emotional when I think about that moment, because  really what he was saying is that my hypermobility was my pre-existing condition. Whereas my right hip, which  also is hyper mobile wasn't arthritic and is fine. So, there was a cam defamation in that left hip and there was  probably some manner of birth defect that I certainly ran to the ground in the first 45 years of living and being  hyper mobile gave me an advantage in the art forms that I loved, which is dance and yoga, and lots of crazy  types of movement.  

00:06:18 

Jill Miller 

That's about that part of the story, but, I could have also not told the story. When I, I'm, I have a company that  are part of our branding is self-care fitness. I teach fascial rolling. I'm a huge advocate for self care health care,  and for educating people about their anatomy and, doing safe mobility and all the things. Here I was  succumbing to this condition that I was living with, ignorant of this whole time. I want to, one of the many  things I teach people is about your body blind spots and getting to know yourself. It's like, how could I not know  I had this decrepit falling apart blocking part? And so it, there was a lot of, questioning and, ego assessing and  also did I really know who I was and there were some identity issues that came up for me, big time with it. 

00:07:25 

Jill Miller 

But, really one, I mean, I've got lots of stories I can tell about it, but one of the, I think one of the big stories for  me about it is that I was living with this decrepit hip and I was living with it relatively pain-free for a very long  time. Meaning the practices that I cultivated and curated were keeping me healthy, vibrant mobile, able to have  two children at late age. I have to look at, I, I wanted to be able to share that what I do, my path of teaching is  

not about pain avoidance, but wow, this pain mitigation work I teach, it really works.  

00:08:11 

Jennifer Milner 

That is really interesting. I, if I'm hearing you correctly, you were already on this path of teaching the full body  rolling, and you had done a lifelong study of yoga and were already on that path. You had this huge thing that  popped up and said, Hey, guess what? And you thought, well, maybe I don't know my body as well as I did and  causes this crisis of identity, which is so common in performing artists, right? When your body is part of your  instrument. For you, when you've been teaching and saying, Hey, I know these things, and here is, here are good  things to do know your body, everything you were saying. This pops up and you have to kind of process through  all of that. At the of that, you realize that what you had been doing actually had been helping, like you said, not  pain, avoidance, been pain mitigation.  

00:09:03 

Jennifer Milner 

It sounds like that's what kind of led you to share your story, which is so important so that other people can have  that same path.  

00:09:11 

Jill Miller 

I was also concerned that, I wanted the teachers that I've trained. I mean, we have 500 teachers I've licensed  worldwide, and we've taught hundreds of thousands of people around the globe. I wanted them to feel secure  that the techniques that I was teaching, weren't the things that led me into the hip replacement condition. That  the things that I'd been teaching over the last 12 years were truly a therapeutic modality. That, I really think the  things that led to the hip replacement, we're doing things like straddle splits, where I'd hear an audible pop every  day, rolling through my pelvis. Like I was on solid gold wrapping, both my legs behind my head, and then  interlace my hands in between them literally tying myself up into articulate, not the arrangements and  connective tissues living at end range, is certainly a dead end. And, and I discovered that, and I really stopped  practicing that way in my early thirties and started doing this, created this program called yoga tuneup so that I  would not end up disarticulated myself and disintegrating inside my own body as I was going that way.  

00:10:30 

Linda Bluestein 

It sounds like, it sounds like up until your surgery, you were functioning at a really pretty high level actually,  which is amazing. So, cause I mean, a lot of people, their level of activity before they have a total liberal  placement, it was going to decline quite dramatically. If they go into surgery being deconditioned and, having a  lot less muscle mass, their outcomes are not as good. That's really amazing that was able to, that was your  prehab program. You didn't intend for it to be a pre-AP program per se, but it definitely worked as one.  

00:11:07 

Jill Miller 

Absolutely. And, and once I got the diagnosis and I knew I was heading towards surgery, I was extremely  disciplined about making sure that I really observed my mechanics and that I kept loading the hip. I wanted to  make sure I maintain as much muscle mass as possible and even grew new muscle mass going into surgery so  that I'd have a shorter recovery.  

00:11:32 

Jennifer Milner 

So smart, so smart. I want to get back to that, but first I want to put, push the pause button on your personal  journey. Talk about one of my favorite topics. Fascia so let's geek out on this for a second. What, what is fascia  and why is it important?  

00:11:54

You want the three minute version or the hour version.  

00:12:02 

Jill Miller 

Gotcha. Is your SIEM system. It is the web, which is a very highly used word in the fascial world. It is your  structural web that connects all of your parts together. It is the living threads that connect bit to bit and suspend  all of your parts within you. It's a, it's the part of it's all of you, it's the part of you that allows for differential  movement to occur. I'm going to shuttle this towards movers. It's the part of you that allows tissues to glide over  one another and to have stretch relative to, from one structure to another. If we think of it in terms of muscles,  which is always one of the easiest ways to think about fascia, it's that whitish extensible stuff that allows  muscles to shift and shimmy next to each other, but within the muscle itself, you also have moving parts within  the muscle.  

00:13:08 

Jill Miller 

You have fascicles that also need to glide internally. You have muscle cells that also are wrapped in their own  fascia that also allow for differential movement within the deeper and deeper structures of a muscle. We have  this constantly connecting web that goes from cell to skin, from toe to face, from Oregon to bone and back  again. Your fascia is, as I mentioned, it's living. So it is constantly regenerating itself. Just like all your body  parts turnover. The main cell of your fascia are known as the fibroblasts and the fibroblasts tend to the web.  They create collagen and elastin. They also destroyed those same structures, in order to maintain, the load that  you place on yourself, either from inside or from outside. Your web is constantly adapting to loads and  environment. Your fascia is also extremely nerve rich. In fact, there's new research. That's that points to the fact  that there are 250 million sensory neurons embedded in your fascial tissue.  

00:14:32 

Jill Miller 

We can say that our fascial tissues are a really important organ for us in terms of gaining proprioception and  interoception. It really is a tissue that helps us to connect it's way to connect us to our nervous systems  perception of ourselves. I believe it, 80 still the founder of osteopathy that said that fascia connects us, connects  all the branches of medicine together. You start to learn about fascia, you get all interested in lymphoma, you  get all interested in vasculature, you get all interested in muscle, and of course you get interested in the nervous  system and motion and movement.  

00:15:13 

Jennifer Milner 

Absolutely. I, it's something that I talk about in my practice a lot. I will tell my dancers, you can either consider  that your body has 600 muscles, or you can consider your body has one muscle and 600 pockets. Those different  pockets are within the fascia, but they are also connected with how they move and, Tom Myers, fascial trains,  and all of that. It's so interesting when you start looking at moving from a fascial perspective and where you can  get stuck up and down that line of fascia. When you look at the it band before, it's all kind of before the fascia is  kind of cleaned away in the dissection, and you think about how big and wide it actually is. It's not just that  narrow strip that a lot of times it's seen in dissection, but that it is so tightly interwoven with your lateral quad  and your lateral hamstring and, from a very practical movement, point of view, having an understanding of  fascia and being able to think of releasing your body from a fascial level before you even try to do muscular  stretching, is so important.  

00:16:21 

Jennifer Milner 

I love that you did a dive deep into that. What, what started you on that journey? Was it, what were you  thinking? My body is so bendy, but no matter how much I stretch, I still feel tight. What else could it be? Like,  what started you down that?  

00:16:38 

Jill Miller 

Well, my father's an infectious disease doctor, and so, luckily I grew up around the language of the body and  especially the language of the diseased body and microbes. This is something that I have a insatiable passion  for. I mean, just before we got on, I was listening to yet another medical podcast about the coronavirus and its  mutations. I just have an insatiable desire to, hear people talk about cells and body parts. I think it's from listening to my dad do call out when I was a kid. I'm probably heard the term fascia from him at some point  because of, some type of fascial disease or infection, but how it really started to learn about it. Functionally was  probably around age 19 when I met my yoga teacher and bodywork mentor Glenn Black, who is, and I can say  this on podcasts, you that yoga recluse, he doesn't have a website.  

00:17:43 

Jill Miller 

He's not the type of person that likes to get lots of emails or press. He is really a, a movement genius, but he's  very private person. I met him while I was teaching, or excuse me, while I was working at the Omega Institute  for holistic studies during college. During my summers in college and Northwestern, I would go out and stay  and live on their property and do work study for the people coming in to take workshops with people like  Deepak Chopra and rom Doss and all those sorts of folks. And Glen talked about fascia. He was a bodyworker  and I think this was also a really big, theme within the Rolfing community. Glen, wasn't a golfer, but he studied  a lot with a chiropractor, as well as with his teacher who was a physiotherapist out of Russia named Shinwell  tops who created a branded his form of physio here in the us called body tuning.  

00:18:47 

Jill Miller 

Actually yoga tuneup pays homage to the lineage of bodywork that I came from through Glenn. Glen would talk  about fascia and Glenn would talk about ligaments and Glen would talk about tendons. I started to get, I would  say my embodiment started to get indoctrinated with medical terminology or clinical terminology while in  practice. We would also, part of his classes were, not just yoga poses, but articulations. We did a lot of  articulations now called controlled articular rotations or controlled articular movements, but we just call them  articulations back. We would also do bodywork on each other to help with proprioception. If he wasn't really  happy with how were doing triangle pose, then he would have us get down on the ground and massage each  other's quadratus lumborum is, or our gluteus medius. He would take us through the anatomy with our fingers or  with our heels or elbows or whatever technique he was teaching us.  

00:19:56 

Jill Miller 

And he would talk about connective tissue. That was really my entry into that as a functional thing. Fast forward  years later, I ended up, reading lots of materials. Of course, I read anatomy trains. I started going into the lab  with Gil Hedley, who is a wonderful humanist and anonymous and a great friend, cause he's slept right here in  this bed behind this is a Murphy bed. I was able to go into the lab and start to do dissections with him, and  continue to study with him to this day. And I work with Tom Myers. Now, Tom and I have a program we're  actually launching in just a couple months called rolling along the anatomy train. The Genesis really went from  being a student of my body, getting familiar with the terminology, then becoming letting that insatiable hunger  to learn more, do labs, excuse me, I skipped over a huge part here, which is getting involved with the fascial  research community and my first fascia research Congress in 2012, I was very bold and I was like, well, I'm  going to submit a case report.  

00:21:09 

Jill Miller 

And they accepted my case report. I ended up presenting a poster on a student of mine who had Charcot Marie  tooth disease or hereditary sensory motor neuropathy, not EDS, but boy, do they present like an EDS patient?  And I really learned a lot about extreme, hypermobility from the student that I worked with for nine years. His  

transformation was what I submitted to the heads of fascia research Congress. That presentation really  empowered me to make allies in the fascia research space and find, really find my friends, this whole new  community of fascia pioneers researchers, movement pros that, really use fascia as an organizing principle for  their work.  

00:22:01 

Jennifer Milner 

Connect the dots for me from connective tissue fascia. Everybody has it, yada, why should bendy bodies in  particular be concerned about fascia and be looking into their fascia?  

00:22:15 

Jill Miller 

Well, this is the best question. Look, your fascia is adaptable, right? We then the people and they like to stretch.  They like to stretch either because it needs to be performative or they like to stretch because the stretch, when you stretch, there are some wonderful neurological changes that help to dampen sympathetic outflow that helped  to promote a parasympathetic state. It chills our anxious minds down. And, I come from a place where this, for  me, the stretch really was my addiction. It was the thing I use instead of Xanax to help me downregulate. That's  just a really big part of my personality. Unfortunately I overdid it and that's part of my legacy, but what your,  the bendy body community needs to know is that, fascia, your connective tissues, they have an end range and  that stretch barrier really needs to be respected. Unfortunately, when you have, conditions within the  hypermobility spectrum, we don't always get that feedback that you're blowing past a safe range, or that you're  moving in a way that is going to destabilize your ability to contract well and hold your body together.  

00:23:40 

Jill Miller 

It's those fascial tissues and all those sensory nerve endings that I mentioned a moment ago, that when they are  moved beyond a certain point, they will break. They will rupture and you will create micro tears and becomes  more and more difficult to move. Well, the more you create these micro injuries, your connected tissue does not  heal fast. Muscle cells repair really quickly. They repair in about 24 hours, but your connective tissues take two  or three times that. If you're doing this every single day, stretching beyond end range, there will be a breaking  point. You have to give your body time to heal and recover unless you are, mobilizing, dancing, stretching, or  yoga, eating really in safe ranges for the majority of your practice. The more we can honor and respect that  stretch barrier, our fascial tissues that are there to hold us together. We, we may be doing ourselves harm on  Unknowingly, and I certainly was, and we talked offline right beforehand.  

00:24:47 

Jill Miller 

I wish I had known certain things 25, 35 years ago. Maybe I wouldn't have thought it in achievement to put my  legs behind my head.  

00:25:01 

Jennifer Milner 

That that was such a fantastic response. Thank you so much. That was, there was, there's a lot in there that I'm  going to be, I think going back to listen to again, because that was really terrific. Thank you for that. I, I know  that you were a contributing author to fascia function and medical application book. What should our listeners  know about your chapter and about the book in general?  

00:25:24 

Jill Miller 

The book fascia function and medical applications is a compendium of 20 chapters that David Liz on-deck and  Dr. Angela achy put together for Taylor and Francis publishing group. There isn't a modern text on the medical  application or on functional fascia applications in the medical space. So they gathered together researchers and  experts. I'm just going to look at the table of contents here, because there are so many different topics just to let  you know, what these topics range from. Some are actually specific applications like, Antonios Stecco and his  

sister, Carlos deco are some of the most notable fascia researchers in the world. They talk about their technique  called fascial manipulation. There's a chapter on scar tissue management. There is exercise and fascial  movement therapy for cancer survivors, and then there's chapters on anatomy. There's a bioteine Segretti  chapter, which is a, basically a new theory on how your fascia behaves as a tensional network in your body.  

00:26:35 

Jill Miller 

The fascia in walking, innovation of fascia, and the circulatory system, hormonal effects of fascia in women. In  my chapter is on self clinical foundations and applications for self myofascial release with balls, rollers, and  tools, because I am a self massage expert. I wrote a chapter on the current research, which there's not a lot,  believe it or not, I'm really only in the last 20 years have there been just slightly over a hundred papers that are  peer reviewed and in medical journals, covering self myofascial release and, looking at different variables. I  covered that the current state of research and, produce this chapter and learned a lot.  

00:27:27 

Linda Bluestein 

That's, that's so interesting. I know that in the, medical world, people will talk about myofascial pain, but even  myself being diagnosed with myofascial pain years ago never thought about the fascia component of it. It was,  and it was not really explained to me either. I've had physical therapy many times and have had myofascial  release in physical therapy. Again, the fascial part of that, even that first of all, there was no real teaching of how you can do this on yourself and or why this is so important. Also the regulation, like you said, I had somebody  who did not respect my end range. It was Oh, wow, look what you can do. Not realizing that just because it can  go there doesn't mean that it should go there. I paid for that for a while afterwards, for sure. So, yeah.  

00:28:24 

Jill Miller 

Yeah. There's so much to respond to what you said. One thing that I didn't mention when were talking about,  well, what is fascia? One thing I think that's helpful for anybody to understand, especially the bendy bodies  folks is that, we have different, qualities of fascia throughout our body. We can think of fascia in layers. By the  way, using the layered approach is very controversial in the fascial space. I find that it's very easy for people to  comprehend this. On the right underneath your skin, you have a really spongy springy layer of fascia. Most  people just call this fat. This is the adipose that really gives your body its form, its shape. People identify you by  this fatty layer, but these fat cells are twined, and sprung and held in place by all the different college and then  elastin vectors, the fabric of the fascia, but also have lots of lymph vessels here.  

00:29:25 

Jill Miller 

We have wonderful circulation, we have nerves and so on. The superficial fascia, which is this most superficial  layer, because it is so nerve rich and, helps us with proprioception. Also when we do specific light touch  applications to the superficial fascia, it also really affects our autonomic nervous system. It can be the gateway  to, deeply relaxing the nervous system, calming down one's heart rate, calming down the breath, pace, allowing  you to actually feel your feelings. This is like one of those places that, where we really encounter, that soft side  of ourselves and our vulnerability. And, I don't know about you. One of my other entry points into all of this  was my own hatred of that layer. That body fat layer was something that in dance at the time when I was in  college and extremely insecure, we did not like that. And I was bulimic.  

00:30:31 

Jill Miller 

So, for me, this superficial layer has been really a work in process and a work in progress in being able to  accept, the, all the parts of me, including the squishy, gummy, runny coming, runny bits. In our culture, this is a  broader statement that I'm an eight, but our culture maligns superficial fascia in a big way, but it doesn't call it  superficial fascia. It just calls it fat. It's interesting that this, nobody, not lot, people don't know the term fascia,  but they certainly know, the other term. We have, this transition zone of fascia between the superficial fascia  and what, Jennifer was describing. You lie T band it band is it's a deep fascia, but it's also something more  complex that's known as an app on a neurosis. It's actually a big, broad tendon, right? Your it band is that it's the  tendon of the gluteus Maximus.  

00:31:29 

Jill Miller 

It's the tendon of the tensor fascia Lata. It also is a deeper fascist structure. You can feel it's stripping anus. It's,  it's thin and it's tough. Many of our deeper fascial, our deep fascial structures have an orientation that make it  look like what's on the wetsuit, right form fits to the muscles. It's not Loggly and bubbly like your superficial  fascia, but in between the deep and the superficial, we have this loose fascial transition zone. This transition  zone is a membranous zone. Sometimes it's called a fascial interface. Sometimes it's called peri fascia. The, it's  interesting, the nomenclature around it is still, loose. It's still not totally set. A lot of the nerve that you're talking  about with myofascial pain syndrome, a lot of the nerve endings are really peppered in this loose fascial zone in  this membranous zone. We think about treatment, maybe rubbing really hard and like really aggravating all  these cells and all these nerves in understanding of layers helps us to decide how to apply pressure, and what are  best practices for our clients that are bendy, but also are bendy people, as are going to have certain spots in their  body that are holding it together for the rest of everything.  

00:32:56 

Jill Miller 

We need to have different applications for not only the different types of fascia on our body, but also the  different locuses that we rely on to hold it all together for us.  

00:33:09 

Linda Bluestein 

That makes sense that's a great explanation. And, that's fabulous. In terms of your yoga work, if we can kind of transition over to that, I know sometimes people that are bendy are told that they should not be practicing yoga.  Can you tell us about what yoga is and how it has influenced your health?  

00:33:31 

Jill Miller 

Well, I wouldn't say that I practice yoga either. I had to step away from the way I was practicing, and that's why  I actually created yoga tuneup so that I could focus more on proprioception. I could focus more on what my  joints were doing or weren't doing, because I think yoga has best practices within it that I think any bendy body  or any human can really benefit from. Some of the best practices that come out of yogas in general are, they're  so great at stoking the parasympathetic nervous system and providing, relaxation, downregulation, and there's  really a beautiful art around their breath, D different types of breathing approaches. You can see that across the  spectrum in different tribes of yoga, because yoga is, have come through many different lineages. So not all  yoga is the same. It's very hard to answer your question. What is yoga? my favorite answer to that is, Oh my  gosh, I'm blanking on her name.  

00:34:36 

Jill Miller 

It'll come to him by the end of the podcast, but a colleague that we did, a lecture series many years ago in  Toronto, and she said, yoga is whenever you say it is, that was her how she wants people to redefine yoga. It's  whatever you say it is. I think yoga can be extremely dangerous for people that are hyper mobile, that like to  hang out and range, and that aren't, that are bypassing their own proprioceptive feedback, bypassing it through  overstretching or bypassing it by using breath techniques that can really make you zone out, or bypassing it  using, even trance-like music that can disembody you that can help you to disassociate rather than to integrate.  So, you know, I'm coming to you. I'm like I literally come back from the dead to report this to you because I  think that can be a very controversial statement if I speak to I to be so diehard in the yoga space, like to say that  to me would have been extremely offensive, but there are mechanisms I think, with that are embedded in yoga  culture that can help people to actually really grow into themselves.  

00:35:50 

Jill Miller 

I think that if used improperly, you can really dissociate and literally disassemble yourself, from end to end, if  you don't have the anatomical correct anatomical education, because a lot of the yoga clans rely on mystical  anatomy and not accurate anatomy. That's part of what I to work on, correcting. Sure.  

00:36:17 

Linda Bluestein 

I actually know a, this is going to sound like a strange combination. He is a neurosurgeon and a functional  medicine doctor and a yoga instructor.  

00:36:28 

Jill Miller 

Wow. I want to take the classes. Right.  

00:36:33 

Linda Bluestein 

Actually he gave me, I, I, he wanted to create a program for people with EDS and he said, do you have a patient  that I could try this out on? And I said, me, okay. Try it out on me. So, he had, he walked me through the  program that he was doing and he, and then he gave a talk at the local hospital on yoga and medical applications  of yoga and your answer and his answer. Like, I feel like aligned perfectly there, maybe from slightly different  perspectives, but that's what he said is that it's turned into so many different things, so many different ways of  practicing. It's I'm trying to think of what would be a good example. If you say bread, obviously now you have  gluten-free bread and then you have wheat bread and you have white bread and whereas it used to be that you  just had like wonder bread, there's, so many different practices.  

00:37:34 

Jill Miller 

I'll say one other thing about the hyper mobile community in yoga. I mean, we are lauded in yoga classrooms  were used as the example were used as the model. I would say that a lot of really successful yoga teachers have  a certain range of mobility that is supernatural and that there might be, there, they may have success because of  their mobility, because it looks like they're doing these geometrical poses that we see in old yoga textbooks and that are showstopping and jaw dropping and carnivalesque, and that is a tool just like, I see it, the Arab basket  behind there's a tool in the image that will draw in a student's aspirational students. If you're somebody like me  who, I mean, there was no end to my flexibility. Teachers could just like, they could lay on top of me and I'd be  doubled over in a post-call paschimottanasana, just a forward bend.  

00:38:42 

Jill Miller 

It just, there's just no end to the gumminess, but this is not a longevity strategy. And, it feels really good. I mean,  it feels really fun. You certainly get two planes of awareness potentially because you're dissociating that are,  kind of thrilling and drug-like, but what I have stopped, at age 21, if someone said you're killing yourself, like I  don't know that I would have heard that.  

00:39:12 

Linda Bluestein 

What, what would you like to go back and tell yourself at that age that you think may be, what you just said just  now was fabulous about the, about not having longevity in that, but is there, verbiage that you think would have  resonated with you back at that time?  

00:39:30 

Jill Miller 

I honestly, I think, well, I'll say this now, but if I had known as much as I know about fascia at this, at that early  age, if I had known about, joint capsules, and if I had known about, ligaments in the way that I know about them  now, I might've made some different decisions, but I didn't, I just didn't know enough about those parts of my  body. I knew that they stretched those parts stretched. If you held them long enough, they'd stretch longer, not a  longevity strategy, right.  

00:40:06 

Jennifer Milner 

It's that, it's that tricky place of, how do we word things for the next generation that is going to be heard? I know  there were, there are so many things that if somebody had said something to me, when I was 14 and people  would say, well, you got to warm up. I'm like, no, I don't that I'm doing just fine. And I think if my 30 year old  self had come back and said, you need to warm up, I would've been like, okay, thanks. I, so it's that giving them  that education, that practical knowledge to go with it and something to show for it. When I talked to dancers and  I teach about, injury prevention, I say the only people that come to injury prevention workshops are the people  who've already been injured. If you relabel it as a performance enhancement workshop, then everybody comes,  so trying to talk to the younger generation, not just to don't do that, but Hey, let's do this instead.  

00:41:00 

Jennifer Milner 

And you will feel better. You will still be a beautiful stretcher. Just, I think so much of it is how we word it and  make it applicable to who they are at that moment.  

00:41:11 

Jill Miller 

Yeah. I think about this a lot with my daughter, she's six and she's a budding gymnast and I'm just seeing it now.  She's so much stronger than I ever was. I mean, she can do pull-ups I can't even do a pull-up now. I mean, come  on and I watch her coaches, I don't interfere, but her coach is very good at this point. I, I just hope that he's just  building her step-by-step with strength, right. And then letting them have fun. How about, I can't imagine  having gone to a yoga workshop in my mid twenties that said, that's title was strengthen your mid range. Like  that's what we need to do as hyper mobile people is find pleasure in those gray zones of the mid range. I am, I'm  working on that right now, as it as an entrepreneur, like as somebody who wants to make sure that I sell to the  mainstream, education that excites them about not being at their end range, that being able to perceive  themselves in their body, no matter what position they're in.  

00:42:23 

Jill Miller 

I think this is something we all need to tackle collectively to really sell mid range as sexy. 

00:42:31

Jennifer Milner 

I like that as a new quote, mid range is sexy.  

00:42:45 

Linda Bluestein 

Yeah. Whether you're hyper mobile or not, I think, we tend to think that we're invincible, that those ages, and  like you said, you think that you can just do whatever you want to your body and it's, well, I do have this bone  here.  

00:42:57 

Jill Miller 

Year, so I, I will use this on occasion. Like my kids know about the scar and we talk about how I got it. I just  hope that just living, that I can be a living museum for them, so that they'll make good choices as they go  forward. I'm also here to help you guide that.  

00:43:19 

Linda Bluestein 

Well, and I don't think that mid-range hat it's an either, or, you don't have to say mid-range is the new sexy, like,  this is where we're going to stay, but if you can't do something in your mid range, how can you expect to do it  well and correctly in your end range? Right. If you can't do a single, pure wet, why are you pushing so hard to  do four? Yeah, exactly.  

00:43:41 

Linda Bluestein 

Exactly. Jill, I would love to hear more about your fascial rolling. You're your own health journey led you to  fascial rolling and developing the role model. Can you tell us about your best selling book, the role model, a  step-by-step guide for erasing pain, improve mobility and live better in your body?  

00:44:01 

Jill Miller 

Yes. I love talking about balls Linda, so I have a set of four different sized, soft pliable, rubber balls. Let me  restate that soft pliable rubber balls, that have a ton of grip to them that grip ahold of your skin that, helped to  shear these different fascial layers that were talking about that guide you, or you use to guide towards different  tissue targets for proprioceptive awareness, for, Mo improvements in mobility, for pain mitigation for self treating. This one it came about because I started learning massage really early in my movement career with I  started studying shops zoo. When I was in college, I saw an open house assigned for an open house at the  shiatsu school. When I was 18, I started studying shiatsu massage. And, in terms of self-practice the first deep  self massage stuff I started doing, how to do with my gut and had to do with my bulemia.  

00:45:15 

Jill Miller 

I was really struggling in Pilates classes and dance classes at my school. I was in the performing arts and I really  had a hard time with this concept of center. I'm going to get to the book, but there's of a story here. I really had a  hard time with the concept of center. Teachers always talked about center move from your center. Of course,  Pilates plot is mat classes were offered, which was amazing way back when I had a teacher, her name was  Juanita Lopez. She was with, the Joffrey and her teacher was Ramana. I would go to class twice a week and I  never got sore in my core. My roommate who was pre-med at the time, she would come with me to these  bloodiest class. She was always dying, just an agony in her abdomen, every class. I was like, I don't know what  she's doing wrong or what I'm maybe what I'm doing wrong.  

00:46:06 

Jill Miller 

But, the Bohemia that I was dealing with was allowing me to just completely bypass my middle. I confessed to a  yoga teacher at the time. I guess I must have also gone to yoga classes in the city. I remember telling a yoga  teacher that I couldn't feel my center and that I was bulimic. I knew these things were connected. She told me to  lay down face down on this, bean bag. This is like being bag that looked like a hamburger bun. It was a prop  from the iron guard are yoga, linear this little beanbag. She said, lay down it face down on your belly and  breathe into it. I put the bean bag on my abdomen, on my navel and then laid face down and I started to feel  agony. I started to feel intense, visceral pain, and I started to feel my emotions. I started to feel everything that I  had been avoiding.  

00:47:04 

Jill Miller 

I knew that part of my healing would, I would have to confront directly, what had been doing to my body and  also the feelings that I was running away from in my body. I started to experiment with that on my own, every  day in my dorm room, I would roll up a towel, and make it look like a honeybun or a hamburger bun. I would  move it around my abdomen and I would breathe. Years later I started experimenting, not just with towels, but  any little tool I could find balls, rollers, hollow, rubber, and eventually very long story married. My husband, I  

was teaching a mix of yoga, a yoga tune up with balls, and he said, you should really brand this and you should  teach other people to teach this. I used these tools, both for the gut and then smaller rubber balls for the whole  body, to help people embody their body, improve purse, proprioception mobility, manage, and treat their own  pain, and improve whatever movement practice it was relative to originally it was yoga tuneup.  

00:48:13 

Jill Miller 

It was helping people turn up their yoga. I found that the role model work had no boundaries. This is what took  me into the fascia research and took me into, different branches within the clinical sphere, from mental health  professionals to, clinical social workers or, somatic psychotherapists, trauma therapists. Social workers were  working in group settings. Use the tools to help bring people into their bodies for whatever purpose they're using  military. The police fire service, college athletics, professional athletics. I mean, it's gone all over the world.  Now we're in so many different places with this application of people learning to map their body, getting to  know their fascia and using tools that really make a really big difference and don't do harm to themselves. We  call this rubber drugs and, the balls have names. There's the cautious ball for the core. There's the alpha ball,  which is our largest solid rubber ball.  

00:49:20 

Jill Miller 

There's therapy ball plus. There's the yoga tuneup balls, which were the first balls that I named. They still have  the name, yoga tuneup, but they're not, they have nothing to do with yoga. They're just grippy, pliable, rubber  balls.  

00:49:33 

Linda Bluestein 

I love that. That's I tell people all the time that if you don't listen to your body, it's going to keep screaming  louder and louder until you finally do. You're teaching people how to tune into their bodies in a way that can  help with emotional healing and physical healing. That's, that's really amazing.  

00:49:54 

Jill Miller 

Yeah. When I did a call for stories for my book, the role model, which was published in 2014, I did a call to  action to, our community of students and teachers, or people who have used our tools. The majority of the  stories that came in were not about a painful knee or back pain. The majority of stories were about emotional  regulation. I found that to be absolutely really enthralling that the biggest category that people were needing  help with in terms of their was their emotional stress and their emotional suffering, and that they found that  therapy balls had become a tool to help regain their sense of self. This by-product this other by-product was that,  Oh yeah. My back pain went away and Oh yeah, I sleep better at night after I roll my jaw or, Oh, I got rid of my  plantar fasciitis, but also, I can go on long walks with my husband now and, just all the things.  

00:50:54 

Linda Bluestein 

That's fabulous because with so many things, is good, but too much can be problematic. So this is.  

00:51:01 

Jill Miller 

You add stretching. Right, right. So you can overdo it. Yeah.  

00:51:09 

Linda Bluestein 

Probably overruled. It's you're not going to over meditate. Probably most people are not going to overrule.  

00:51:15 

Jill Miller 

Yeah, there's a couple that have, speak with them. I do not advocate sleeping with your balls, but my father. And  so he's a doctor. He can prescribe putting the, it helps him with his SSI joint. So helped him with the sciatic  pain. So go for it, dad,  

00:51:35 

Jennifer Milner 

You know, whatever works. Jill, I just, I love how your personal journey, seemed to start at such an early age  and trying to confront your eating disorder at an early age and having this sense from a very early time period of  wanting to know more and wanting to figure out and wanting to do it right. That's such a blessing that was just  part of who you were and that you weren't. I mean, obviously, you had issues and, but then you started trying to  address them and work through them. I love how that sense of curiosity and also being determined to do it right.  Has benefited so many people because you honestly were moving forward doing these things. You were like,  Oh, wait, that's not right, because now I have to have a hip. Oh wait. But that actually did help me. Now I'm  going to go tell more people about this and just your personal journey, is helping so many other people.  

00:52:30 

Jennifer Milner 

We're really grateful that you are, that you're willing to share your story and the knowledge that you've gained  as you've kind of researched your own way to, health instability. I love that.  

00:52:42 

Jill Miller 

Well, thank you. Thank you. I've learned a lot. I've learned a lot. I listening to you all too. You've added to my  journey, so much, you've added a lot to it.  

00:52:53 

Linda Bluestein 

That's great. That's great. Well, we love putting together all of these different disciplines and, there's so many  different things that can be so useful for all of us as human beings and human bodies. Right. Was there anything  else that you wanted to talk about that we didn't cover? And if you can also let people know where they can  learn more about you and the work that you're doing.  

00:53:18 

Jill Miller 

Yeah. I would love to share just a couple of programs that I have that are very comprehensive, that if you're  really interested in learning about fascia and about rolling, that I think will really educate you at whatever level  you want to take it in. At first of all, our website tuneup fitness.com, we produce very robust articles that have  lots of free content, interviews with experts all over the world, in different topics. There's one that's been very  popular over the last year because of the pandemic is on the vagus nerve. This happens to be one of my most  favorite topics, especially because I tie it in with respiration. I have a whole training program around that called  the breath and bliss immersion that will be happening in March. We do that a few times a year and we're doing  it virtually now. There's another, longevity program called walking well that I collaborated on with a friend of  mine, Katie Bowman of nutritious movement.  

00:54:12 

Jill Miller 

She's a really in the movement, spectrum, no furniture in her house, barefoot, all the time kind of thing. She's  just amazing. She lives off of Washington, but she's an incredible educator, especially around biomechanics.  And we created this program called walking. Well, that really addresses the walk, bit by bit, and I do roll outs  and she pairs those with movements. The reason I mentioned this is one of the things I learned in my hip  recovery was that I had actually danced and yoga did a natural walk out of my body at a very early age. My  walk was very unnatural due to the hypermobility that I generated along with whatever genetic conditions might  be there, we'll find out someday. Right. Linda. But, so I think the walking well program is really educational and  it, you can get entered at any level. You don't have to be an expert mover to do it.  

00:55:06 

Jill Miller

We, I'm hoping my mother and her friends, this is their entry point, but it's also very good for rehab. If you had a  knee surgery or you had any joint replacements, very good. The other, program that's coming up really soon that  I think would be really interesting for your clinical followers, is that rolling along the anatomy trains, program  with myself and Tom Myers, it's almost nine hours of content where he does very rich, deep anatomy lectures. I  teach movements and rollouts for each of the anatomy trains. And that's launching in April. You can always find  me on my website, tuna fitness.com or I'm commonly found on Instagram with the handle at yoga tuneup. We  also have a brand page at tuneup fitness. If you like giveaways follow at tuneup fitness, cause I don't do  giveaways on at yoga tuneup. You'll have to see pictures of my kids if you're on my page.  

00:56:01 

Linda Bluestein 

Well, that is fabulous. We, this has been such an informative episode, so much great content, and we really  appreciate you sharing your personal journey and all of the incredible research that you've done, all the  fabulous, programs that you've created. Everything's really great work that you're doing. So.  

00:56:24 

Jill Miller 

Thank you, Linda. Thank you, Jennifer. I'm excited to interact with your community and you can just shoot me  questions about fascia and rolling and all of that through either one of those places that I mentioned.  

00:56:36 

Jennifer Milner 

Sounds great. We will, we will definitely do that. Well. Good. Well, you all have been listening to bendy bodies  with the hypermobility MD today. We have been talking with Jill Miller co-founder of tune up fitness  worldwide, and Joe, we are so grateful to you for taking the time to come on to Vandy bodies podcast and share  your expertise with us today. Thank you so much. Thank you for joining us for this episode of bendy bodies  with hypermobility MD, where we explore the intersection of health and hypermobility for dancers and other  artistic athletes. Please leave us a review on your favorite podcast player. Remember to subscribe so you won't  miss future episodes. Be sure to subscribe to the bendy bodies, YouTube channel as well. Thank you for helping  us spread the word about hypermobility and associated conditions. Visit our website, www.bendybodies.org.  For more information, for a limited time, you could win an autographed copy of the popular textbook disjointed  navigating the diagnosis and management of hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndrome and hypermobility spectrum  disorders just by sharing what you love about the bendy bodies podcast on Instagram, tag us at bendy  underscore bodies and on Facebook at bendy bodies podcast.  

00:57:55 

Jennifer Milner 

The thoughts and opinions expressed on this podcast are solely of the co-hosts and their guests. They do not  necessarily represent the views and opinions of any organization. The thoughts and opinions do not constitute  medical advice and should not be used in any legal capacity whatsoever. This podcast is intended for general  education only and does not constitute medical advice. Your own individual situation may vary, do not make  any changes without first seeking your own individual care from your physician. We'll catch you next time on  the bendy bodies podcast.